


Quintessence

by Kindness



Category: Actor RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-30
Updated: 2011-01-30
Packaged: 2019-07-08 08:12:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15926414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kindness/pseuds/Kindness
Summary: These are the deleted scenes, the jokes they cut for time.





	Quintessence

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](https://oxoniensis.dreamwidth.org/35812.html?thread=5557220#cmt5557220). Finally getting around to transferring my handful of LJ-only fics to AO3, in the Year of Our Lord 2018.
> 
> Prompt: _push_

V.

There isn't a beginning of the end. You think there should be, but there isn't. You don't have one enormous fight, after which everything unravels; you don't have an epiphany; you don't have a Talk. It's just one off night, one hour, one second, like you've had a thousand times before, and you don't remember any specific moment at all. You think it might come to you, after the fact, like some kind of great overwhelming wisdom that you're supposed to get. Hindsight is 20/20, right?

It doesn't, and it's not.

IV.

The really good moments are the secret ones, the normal ones, the ones that wouldn't sound like a story if you told them. These are the deleted scenes, the jokes they cut for time:

You come home from a party, a casual thing, the first barbecue of the summer. She's cracking jokes about a friend of hers, something to do with a goldfish or a Lamborghini or a dogsled; you're pulling the door shut behind you. She knows when you're not paying attention – she always knows – and breaks off mid-sentence to toss her purse at you. Underhand. She says, "Think fast!" and you laugh, because has she ever said that before in her life?

There's woodsmoke caught in her hair and in the weave of her dress. She looks sunny and happy and beautiful, and, ten minutes later, when she's straddling you on the foyer floor half-naked, you go, "You're so _pretty_ ," like you can't help or believe it, and you sound like an idiot, but she looks so pleased that you figure, there are worse things to be.

III.

It's okay that she annoys you. A lot of the things that make her a pain, are also the things that make her _her_ , and you love her.

She's quick. She's so quick, it drives you crazy. Because it's one thing to sit down and see it on TV every week, and it's another (amazing) thing to get to play off it that one time "with the Rumor," and it's a third thing altogether to go up against it when you're arguing about drain cleaner or what to do with the flat sheet. For someone who looks so agreeable and wholesome, she's awfully hard to outwit.

She's focused. She works harder, sometimes, than you think you've ever worked; she's driven in a way that you're not. Sometimes you think it's what makes you guys work – your differences. Other times, it snakes between you, and then you have your real fights. And she doesn't back down the way you'd have expected her to, before you knew her; and you don't back off the way she'd have expected you to, before she knew you. But you do circle away from each other, sometimes, just for a short while; and when you come back you kiss along every curve of her body and remind her (and yourself) that you never, ever wanted to end up with someone who didn't know what she wanted.

She drives like a convict on the run, or someone from a country with no traffic lights.

II.

Some days, you can't get over what she is. How much people love her; how _many_ people love her. Not that people don't love you, of course; because nobody stalks and photographs guys no one cares about – but there's a different quality to her fan base than to yours.

She's part of a worldwide phenomenon; she's a cultural touchstone. She's one-sixth of an incredible group that millions of people, yourself included, feel like they _know_ ; she's one half of an iconic pair. Her fictional soulmate's got his own catchphrase. She's got her own haircut.

Ironically, you like her hair least in "The Rachel," and you're both pretty glad it's not 1995 anymore. You like her hair with curls and waves and natural, like when one of you stays over and you wake up together in the morning, or when she's just out of the shower. She says she hated it growing up, and to this day she wears it straight whenever she can. But you like to think that maybe she'll hate it less now, as you tell her again and again how sexy you find it.

Little kids gravitate towards her on the street. Preschoolers; toddlers; children too young to recognize her. Their parents are almost always flustered; Jen is never anything but warm. Her colleagues like to joke about it, too – about her heart; it's not something that only happens with you.

Some days, you can't get over who she is.

I.

Your first date is brokered by your managers. It's just the way things happen – "I'll have your people call my people," so to speak, like a professional merger or...anything other than a date – and it's been years that you've been in the business now, but it still feels ridiculous. Shouldn't you call her yourself? Shouldn't you be forced to psych yourself out, make a list of talking points, worry about saying something wrong? Not that you do that, much, anymore, or ever did that second one. But it's the principle of the matter.

Your first kiss is the world's least romantic heist. You're under a torn awning; you're in a crevice by the back entrance. You're taking separate cars and you're both worried about being seen. You block her from view as much as you can, not that you really know where they could be, and you kiss her for the first time against a brick wall that someone may or may not have peed on. You're praying the whole time that nobody's watching.

On the other hand, there are no apt words for the first time you have sex. Except to say, it's slow and sacred and private, and nothing like committing a crime, and you make it exactly everything you want it to be.


End file.
